Halloween (because I am unoriginal in my timing of posts)

Halloween

Director: John Carpenter

Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasence

1978

Reposted from three years ago on my old site

I just had the most delightfully creepy experience of watching Halloween in a theater last night.  In the dark, with the movie on a gigantic screen, surrounded by fellow film-lovers Halloween aficionados, the strength and quality of the film was clear, as well as its ability to genuinely creep you out.

The plot is simple: Psychopath Michael Myers escapes from a mental institution and returns to the house where he grew up.  He then stalks and terrifies a group of teenagers, lead by Laurie Strode (Curtis), on Halloween night, while his doctor (Pleasence) hurries to track him down.

Really, that’s it.  That’s all there is.  And yet from the very first shot of the film, this is a creepy movie.  In the first shot, Carpenter establishes the style he will use throughout the film; point-of-view camera work, unsteady, almost hand-held photography, meant to put you inside the unsettling head of Michael Myers.  The first shot, practically one very long take (I believe there is a hidden cut in there somewhere) is a bravado shot, starting from the outside of a house, then looking through windows at scenes on the inside, then in the house through the back, up the stairs, into a bedroom, then back downstairs and out the front door – all supposedly shot as young Michael Myers as he kills his older sister in 1963.  This camerawork establishes Carpenter as a force to be reckoned with.  He is not afraid of breaking tradition for something as simple as a teen horror flick.  It’s a breathless opening to the film, exhilarating, and, given its context, unsettling.

The point-of-view camerawork is one of the major cruxes of the film.  Nearly all the time, the POV shots are of Michael.  You know where he is and what he’s doing.  You’re him watching Laurie.  You’re him watching a young boy.  Carpenter lingers on his long shots in the first half of the film, before night has fallen and the terror escalates, as Myers watches Laurie walk down the sidewalk.  The uncomfortably long shot has you, the viewer, screaming “LAURIE, LOOK BACK!  TURN AROUND!  HE’S WATCHING YOU!”  Carpenter wisely does not cut these too short.  The sinister atmosphere is in the interminable length, not in the shadows or darkness.

When you’re not in Michael’s POV, hearing him breathe (another vastly disconcerting aspect of the film), you’re watching him appear and disappear as if from nowhere.  The young children that Laurie is babysitting keep on talking about the Bogeyman, and, well, YEAH, Michael Myers IS the Bogeyman!  He stands, staring, across the street, or through a clothesline.  The characters see him, standing and staring.  The characters look away, then look back – and he’s gone.  Where did he go?  What’s going on here?  Who is this person with the utterly unnerving blank white face and mechanic’s jumpsuit?

There is a significant relationship between Hitchcock and Carpenter in this film.  The doctor’s name is Sam Loomis (helloooo, Psycho!), the young boy that Laurie is babysitting is named Tommy Doyle, the name of Jimmy Stewart’s police detective friend in Rear Window, and then, of course, there’s the casting of Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of Janet Leigh of Psycho infamy.  Beyond these sly references, however, the relationship continues to the overall feel of the film.  Hitchcock famously once explained how he defined suspense.  The story goes that Hitch asks us to picture a table, around which four men are playing poker.  In an action movie, he said, you watch the men play poker, when suddenly a bomb explodes from under the table.  That’s action.  Suspense, on the other hand, would start with the same four men playing poker around the table, Hitch argued, but then the camera cuts to the bomb under the table.  Cut back to the card game, then recut to the bomb.  In suspense, you are aware of the danger in advance, and the suspense is achieved because you do not know exactly WHEN the danger will strike.  That is what Hitchcock did so marvelously, and that is what Carpenter manages to achieve in Halloween as well.  Thing is, most typical horror slasher flicks follow the formula where, for the first half of the film, you meet the characters and the film establishes how normal and safe their lives are.  In the second half, the killer appears and starts wreaking havoc.  This formula is NOT played out here in Halloween.  You see Michael Myers throughout the entire movie.  There is no initial set-up; Myers is stalking from the very beginning.  You see him constantly, watching people, waiting… but what is he waiting for?  He’s clearly dangerous, but you don’t know what he’ll do or when he’ll strike.  You saw him out the window, but then he disappeared – is he in the room now?  The first onscreen death (other than Myer’s sister in the opening shot) isn’t until about two-thirds of the way through the film.  Until that point, Carpenter is literally turning the screws and ratcheting up the tension notch by notch.  We keep seeing him BUT HE’S NOT DOING ANYTHING!!  The lack of action, more than anything else, is maddening in terms of creating truly effective suspense.  You’re waiting, waiting, waiting for Myers to strike… so much so that by the time he finally does, you jump out of your seat.  Hitchcock would be proud.

There are numerous brilliantly choreographed sequences in the film where a character JUST MISSES seeing Michael Myers.  The doctor turns to the camera just when the car that you know Myers has drives by in the background.  A character on the phone looks out the window, then looks back, and we see Myers in the window – but when the characters returns to the window, Myers is gone and we didn’t see him leave.  These lovely little sequences fit beautifully in to continually remind you that he’s out there… watching you, eluding capture, waiting to strike.

The weakest parts of the film are the performances.  You can tell that Carpenter cast young actors unaccustomed to making film.  As Jamie Lee Curtis’ first film, she does a good job, but definitely has some wooden line delivery.  Laurie’s friends, though, are more laughable and much less capable.  My husband and I mercilessly mock the “Totally!” girl.  There is not exactly prodigious acting talent in this movie. 

Almost more famous for the spate of slasher films it spawned in the eighties than for the film that it is, Halloween is truly a cut above the rest of its ilk.  It’s unnerving and disturbing without being bloody, gory, or vulgar.  Personally speaking, I have a relatively low tolerance for blood and gore and I seek my scary thrills not from violence but from atmosphere.  Halloween is absolutely dripping with atmosphere and creepiness.  Although the violence is downright tame by today’s torture porn standards, I would argue that Halloween is a better film and a scarier film for it, because the thrills come from suspense and not from blood or shock.  Forget the sequels; this is the original, and it’s a masterpiece.

Arbitrary Rating: 8.5/10.  I am NOT a slasher film fan, but I really enjoy this one.

Days of Heaven

Days of Heaven

1978

Director: Terrence Malick

Starring: Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Linda Manz, Sam Shepard

Does anyone out there know what caused Malick to come out of hibernation, as it were?  For ages, it was looking like Badlands and Days of Heaven were his only two feature films, then people started peeing with excitement over his Thin Red Line, made two decades after Days of Heaven.  And now, with three films in post-production, he’s practically on a one-film-a-year schedule.  Bizarre.

Days of Heaven, the film he made before dropping off the face of the cinematic world for twenty years, is a lyric study of a fairly simple love story.  Bill (Gere), whose name is only mentioned once in the movie, is laboring in Chicago’s steel factories in the 1910s.  After an accident with his boss, he takes his girlfriend (Adams) and his younger sister (Manz) on the run out to northern Texas where they join other migrant workers.  Hired by a wealthy young farmer (Shepard) to help with the year’s wheat harvest, Bill tells everyone that his girlfriend is actually his sister; when he sees the rich farmer making eyes at his lover, Bill concocts a plan.  Finding out that the farmer is terminally ill, he pushes his girlfriend to reciprocate the farmer’s advances so they may stake a claim to his fortune.  How could such a well thought out plan go wrong?  You’re smart, dear reader, I’m sure you can imagine how this ends.

  

Don’t tune in to Days of Heaven for the sad love story.  Dialogue is sparse at best, and it becomes abundantly clear early on that the narrative is not the focus.  No, Days of Heaven is a Landscape Movie.  This is all about Malick photographing the American Midwest and the flora and fauna of northern Texas.  Where I think Days of Heaven works better than an average Landscape Movie is how Malick uses the natural scenery he’s shooting as symbolic of the emotions of the central love story.  In the opening sequence, where we see Bill’s accident with his boss at the steel factory, we hear virtually no dialogue.  You see Bill and the man shouting at one another, but they are drowned out by the ridiculously loud machinery clanging in background.  There is fire and roaring and metal, and it’s angry and aggressive and dangerous.  It matches Bill’s emotions, then.  When we move the action out to north Texas, there is lightness and happiness in the images we see, as Bill feels he has escaped a bad situation.  When things get complicated between his girlfriend and the farmer, we enter winter scenes in the film.  There is cold and snow and ice.  When the farmer begins to suspect that Bill is not the girl’s brother at all, there is the climactic locust and fire sequence, fraught with danger and the same aggression we saw at the beginning of the film.  I like the artistry in Days of Heaven because it underlines the love story very well.  I don’t feel as though Malick is showing me pictures of pheasants “just cuz,” but to make a point, to show me something about the story.  I read an interpretation of Days of Heaven that aligned each of the four main characters with Earth (the Linda Manz character, always playing in the dirt), Air (the farmer, puttering around with his weathervane), Water (Brooke Adams’ girlfriend, first seen wading by a river), and Fire (Bill, working in the fiery steel factory).  It’s a very interesting interpretation, and one that works for me.  

Days of Heaven was scored by Ennio Morricone.  I’m very hit or miss when it comes to Morricone.  I know he’s apparently some movie scoring deity to most everyone, but not to me.  His score here is less a score and more endless adaptations of Saint-Saëns’ “Aquarium” from Saint-Saëns’ iconic “Carnival of the Animals.”  While “The Swan” is the most famous piece from “Carnival of the Animals” (and possibly the most famous work by Saint-Saëns full stop), I’ve always enjoyed “The Aquarium” more as it’s even more evocative to me than its more famous counterpart.  There’s a distinct other-worldliness to “The Aquarium,” a slight sense of dissonance, of unease, and it works perfectly in Days of Heaven in establishing tone.  Frankly, I think Morricone did the right thing by essentially taking a cue from “The Aquarium” and scoring the film as variations on this one piece of classical music.  It does undercut Morricone’s job as a composer (because he’s really just adapting Saint-Saëns here, not exactly writing anything new, per se) but it works.  It’s a smart choice. 

I also like Linda Manz in this film, both her character and her narration.  Actually 16 when she filmed this, she’s meant to play a younger character, more like 12 or 13.  Manz gives a hard edge to her character without making her too grown up.  She is still innocent in some respects, but also very clear-sighted when it comes to the people and the world around her.  Her character wouldn’t hesitate punching out most obnoxious movie children characters, but I think she’d manage to pull off that sort of violence in an endearing way.  I enjoy the character’s straightforward optimism.  She doesn’t yearn for a brighter tomorrow, but she accepts her lot for what it is with clear eyes and a vision of how to make it the best possible reality, and yet she isn’t a Pollyanna.  Honestly, she felt the most fleshed out of all the characters in the film.

Despite the very pretty pictures, I found Days of Heaven significantly less potent in this, my second time seeing it on the big screen.  When I originally saw Days of Heaven at the Dryden about four years ago, I thought it very powerful indeed.  I was enraptured by the dangerous love story and the gorgeous images.  I was looking forward to seeing it at the Dryden again.  Much to my dismay, however, it did not stand up nearly as well on this, a repeat viewing.  I wasn’t nearly as emotionally invested in my second go around.  It felt weaker, less magical, with very pretty pictures but caricatures acting instead of fully formed characters.  I couldn’t help but feel disappointed.  So it’s difficult for me to come down with a final judgment on Days of Heaven.  While never a perfect 10 for me to begin with, it’s an odd example of a repeat viewing actually hurting a film for me when it usually serves to improve my opinion.  

  

And really, that’s where I ultimately make a decision about Days of Heaven.  It’s very nice to look at, but it feels a bit empty, which is really surprising given Malick’s reputation for profundity.  It did not bear up well on a second go-around, and I’m the sort who loves to watch movies multiple times.

Arbitrary Rating: 7/10